incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

So this Overdyed Red Dragon by Dragon Dreams was a gift at Christmas 2008, a.k.a. the Christmas after people heard that I'd started cross-stitching again to make stuff for SteelyKid's room. I started it in 2010 on a scroll frame (skeletal picture), but that meant it went very slowly because I do most stitching on my lunch break at work, and bringing the scroll frame in seemed a little much.

After experimenting with stitching in the hand, I took it off the scroll frame in November 2015 and brought it into work; at that point I'd finished the body through about, oh, draw a line up from the edge of the right-most claw. Up close, you can see where the stitches become a bit fuller because of the change, but I don't think it's obvious if you aren't looking for it. So I finished the body and did the metallic threads, the backstitching of the solid parts, and the belly scales. And then I came to a screeching halt when the thread I had for the wings was the wrong color—it was what was specified by the pattern, but the manufacturer must've changed the color. I went on A Quest to find overdyed thread with a lot of red, blue, and purple: made a couple of trips to moderately-local stores, ordered literally half-a-dozen things off the Internet (half of which required test stitching to rule in or out), and finally gave up and ordered the same color as the belly scales, except in silk not cotton. Way less blue than the model, but it was the best I was going to do.

I do regret that I stitched the wings on the short diagonal, not the long one, which I think would make more sense anatomically, but I started with the top narrow section, had to rip out substantial portions at least twice (not counting all the test stitches), and so I was very much not in the mood to redo that entire section when I got to the first wide section and realized what I'd done.

Here are some pictures! Taken with my phone, because I get very direct sunlight into my office at a certain point in the day and taking pictures with indoor overhead lighting is always unsatisfying. The fabric is a pale steel-grey/blue-ish, not white. Click to make ginormous.

The full-length version:

A close-up of the top:

And two random artsy angles, just because:

Anyway, I did this first as kind of a test run for the other dragon pattern I received that Christmas, as they are both large and use metallic thread. There's one little thing I want to do before I start that, but then full speed ahead! (I think I'm going to try stitching it in the hand, just because it is so fast for whole stitches, but we'll see how it goes; wrangling a much wider piece of fabric might be too difficult. Though if I don't, I'll probably go with Q-snaps instead of the scroll frame, for convenience.)